The other—that is, Ebenezer Scrooge—made his way briskly through the streets, scattering crowds of workers bound from their stifling offices to their stifling lodgings with his regular shouts of “Merry Christmas!” punctuated occasionally by an equally inappropriate “And a Happy New Year!” When one unsuspecting clerk stopped Scrooge to enquire about this odd greeting, the New Year being, in the mind of the clerk, some six months distant, Scrooge replied that the calendar was an arbitrary governor of a man’s life and that the year began anew whenever one decided to live his life in a new way. The clerk managed to escape before Scrooge could explain just how this change might be effected, but his disappearance made not the slightest difference in Scrooge’s holiday temper. Only a few steps on, he paused before the open door of an office to regale the occupants with a Christmas carol, but at the first sound of
“God Bless you merry, gentlemen!
May nothing you dismay”
the door was slammed with such energy of action that even Scrooge came close to flinching before he toddled off down the road.
Just as the hour for shutting up the countinghouse arrived, so did Scrooge, strolling through the open door with his usual goodwill.
“You should take the day off tomorrow,” he said, as Cratchit dismounted from his stool. “Spend some time with your little grandson. I’m sure young Timothy would find it quite convenient.”
“I don’t find it convenient,” replied Cratchit in the tone of a parent attempting for the hundredth time to disabuse a stubborn child of a ridiculous notion. “And I don’t find it fair. If I did such a thing and failed to reduce my salary by half a crown, I’d think the firm ill-used.”
“And yet,” said Scrooge, “you don’t think the firm ill-used when I draw a day’s wages for an hour’s copying letters and seven more wandering about the city wishing strangers a merry Christmas.”
Cratchit observed that, whilst this was a bit unfair, it happened only about once a week.
“A poor excuse for picking your pocket,” said Scrooge. “If it eases your conscience, you may come in all the earlier the next day.”
Cratchit remarked that he would be of little help to his grandson if he were not careful to see the firm remained profitable and that he fully intended to arrive at an early hour the next morning; he flinched only moderately when, as he left, Scrooge bellowed after him, “Merry Christmas!” Cratchit, after all, was used to it.
The office was closed in a moment, and Scrooge walked with a lightness in his step, puzzling to other pedestrians weighed down by the heat, to a nearby tavern. There he settled in to read the papers and to take his evening meal in a room which anyone else on such a day would have called stuffy but which Scrooge thought of as cosy. The tavern keeper had learned long ago that whatever Scrooge took for dinner (tonight it was mutton), he would take Christmas pudding with it, and so that concoction had been prepared in anticipation of Scrooge’s arrival. The tavern keeper knew, too, that although Scrooge could rarely afford to pay his bill (tonight was no exception), he was nonetheless good for business; most of London knew that Scrooge dined at this particular tavern, and much of London stopped by now and again for a mug of ale and a chance to gawk at the old fool daintily consuming his Christmas pudding in the long days of summer.
Recall, if you will, Scrooge’s lodgings—the lowering pile of a building huddled in the dark corner of a dark yard amongst neighbours which would have seemed decrepit on their own but which, by comparison to the house where Scrooge made his abode, positively gleamed with youth. At the front of the house we find the heavy door with its great knocker, behind that door the flight of stairs wide enough to accommodate a hearse broadside, and at the top of those stairs Scrooge’s gloomy suite of rooms: sitting room, bedroom, and lumber room, none furnished with any chattels beyond the necessary. Some things about Scrooge had remained unchanged after his well-publicised transformation two decades ago, amongst them his ascetic domestic arrangements.
The sole exception to this rule stood by the window in the sitting room. Scrooge called it his “German toy,” but to those who glimpsed it from the street below it was merely a Christmas tree. Even in the pale evening light it sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were miniature French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, and various other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton) perched amongst the boughs; there were jolly broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men—and no wonder, for their heads came off and showed them to be full of sugarplums; there were fiddles and drums; there were tambourines, books, workboxes, paint boxes, and sweetmeat boxes; there was real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf; there were imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a child visitor to Scrooge’s rooms once delightedly whispered to her bosom friend, “There is everything, and more.”
In what most of London had come to think of as his former life (that is, the time before the appearance of four ghosts one Christmas Eve transformed his general outlook), Scrooge had derived a substantial augmentation to his income by letting out the other rooms in the building as offices. As then, those rooms were now filled in the daytime with clerks and visited by gentlemen who resembled, in clothing and carriage, the Messrs. Pleasant and Portly; however, Scrooge’s income from all this bustling activity could now be expressed in a single syllable: nil. The rooms were now let, on terms that far exceeded liberal, to various charitable societies which attempted, in their various ways, to fulfill the various needs of London’s lowermost classes.
By the time Scrooge returned to the house, the windows were all dark and even the yard was deep in shadow, for the sun had finally been coaxed out of the sky into its briefest retirement of the year. Now, it is a fact that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that, as aforementioned, it was very large. Nonetheless, it was Scrooge’s habit, having his key in the lock, to look deep into the shadows that rippled across the surface of the brass. A passing observer might have attributed this behaviour to the acknowledged fact that Scrooge had as much of what is called “fancy” about him as any man in London—including the wittiest actor in the West End and the happiest lunatic in Bedlam. But to Scrooge, the behaviour of the knocker had become an omen, a harbinger of what might await him in his rooms above. On this night, as on many previous nights in the past twenty years, Scrooge saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change, not a knocker, but Marley’s face.
Yes, Jacob Marley, once partner in Scrooge’s countinghouse but now dead one score and seven years, was in the habit of making periodic appearances in Scrooge’s knocker. Tonight his countenance glowed lurid in the evening haze, as if the sun had not undertaken its brief nocturnal sojourn but still reflected off the polished brass. To anyone else, it would have seemed horrible, but in Scrooge, who knew what the ghostly spectacles and curiously stirred hair portended, Marley’s appearance engendered not fear but delight. Scrooge rubbed the knocker, which was once again merely a knocker, with one hand as he turned the key with the other. Chuckling, he entered the dim hall and mounted the stairs, trimming his candle as he went.
Even at that time of year, when the yard without was never truly dark, half a dozen gas lamps out of the street wouldn’t have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose it was pretty dark even with Scrooge’s candle.
Up Scrooge bounced, not caring a button for that: Darkness was cheap, and a penny saved in tolerating darkness for himself might subsequently be spent providing light for someone else. As soon as he passed through his door, he eagerly searched his rooms for any evidence that the event foreshadowed in the knocker had already taken place, but found everything in its usual order and himself quite alone. The door to his rooms he left unlocked, as if this would provide a more convenient ingress for his expected visitor. Quite satisfied with this minimal and wholly unnecessary
preparation, he took off his cravat and put on his dressing gown and slippers, eschewing his nightcap in silent sympathy with the rest of London, who, unlike him, suffered from the heat. He sat down before the grate—empty as much because of economy as because of the weather—to read a novel by the flickering light of his taper.
At the end of a chapter in which the youthful hero had walked from London to Dover with little to assuage his hunger or protect him from the elements, Scrooge laid his book upon the table so that he might wipe a tear from his eye, so moved was he by the plight of the fictional boy. He gazed for a moment at the tiles around his fireplace, barely visible in the candlelight. They were designed to illustrate the Scriptures, but Scrooge had come to think of them as unnecessarily focused on violent incidents from the Old Testament. He had, the previous year, thought to replace them with a more fanciful set by an artist whose work he had seen at an exhibition, but on his way to visit the artist he had emptied his pockets to a destitute woman he met in the street (Scrooge often travelled by such streets as were likely to introduce him to such women) and so, having not a farthing with which to commission a fresh set of tiles, he had turned his wanderings in another direction, arriving home without having sought out the artist after all.
Finding the tiles difficult to focus on in the dimness, Scrooge turned his attention to the one object in the room (besides, some would say, the Christmas tree) that might seem superfluous—a bell pull that hung in the sitting room and communicated for some purpose long forgotten with a chamber in the highest storey of the building. Rising from his chair, he grasped the pull and gently tugged it, knowing that more than the most tentative pressure would surely end what had been an extraordinarily long life for the threadbare pull. At first, the bell scarcely made a sound, but soon it rang loudly, and as if in sympathy, so did every bell in the house.
“Come along, friend,” cried Scrooge, “show yourself! I’ve no wish to sit up all night, even on so short a night as this.”
Straightaway a clanking began as heavy chains were dragged up the stairs. Satisfied that the bells had done their work, Scrooge settled back into his chair and waited for the arrival of the ghost (for it was none other than Marley’s ghost who dragged chains ever closer to Scrooge’s apartment). Scrooge had considered Marley no more than a business partner in life; he had come to think of Marley as his dear friend in death and had even taken to calling him by his given name. It was this name he uttered when a momentary flame leapt up in the grate, signaling the ghost’s arrival at his door.
“Don’t keep a poor old man waiting, Jacob!” he cried with delighted anticipation. “Come in and take a seat.” Scrooge could never say exactly how Marley did come in—he did not float through the door nor seep under it nor ooze through the keyhole. One moment he was rattling his chains on the landing, and the next he was sitting in the chair opposite Scrooge, his boots propped up on the fender. The phantom brought with him a blast of chill air which would have been welcomed by anyone else in London that night but which had no more effect on Scrooge than the afternoon’s swelter had.
Marley’s clothes had grown somewhat out of fashion in the years since his death—his pigtail, waistcoat, tights, and boots looked more like a stage costume than a proper businessman’s attire. His chain of cashboxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel was clasped about his middle. Scrooge thought its length must have diminished over the years, thanks to his friend’s good works, but it was still a heavy burden, and Marley seemed glad of the opportunity, however fleeting, to rest.
On his otherwise barren chimneypiece, Scrooge kept a decanter of brandy and a pair of snifters (a long-ago Christmas gift from his nephew) for just such occasions. Only when his late partner was fully settled in the chair opposite did Scrooge rise and pour one glass nearly full, then dribble a few drops into the other. The full glass he passed to Marley; the other he kept for himself—not drinking, but periodically breathing the rich vapours that circulated in its depths. Marley had politely taken his usual chair, a ragged and decrepit affair that would be no worse for the fresh brandy stains Scrooge would find there next morning—for it might truly be said of Marley that he could not hold his liquor.
It occurred to Scrooge that he might remark on this defect in his friend’s character, for he was much in the habit of making merry, but Marley’s fixed, glazed eyes and the hot vapours that swirled his ghostly hair told Scrooge there was more import to this visit than desire for a friend’s society and wit. Marley was often wont to sit with Scrooge when the living member of this peculiar pair suffered a sleepless night due to an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, or a fragment of an underdone potato, but tonight Marley downed his brandy and, as the stain spread slowly across the cushion, raised his face to the ceiling and let out a cry of such lament that Scrooge, in spite of himself, felt chilled to his marrow.
“What troubles you, good friend?” asked Scrooge, in as calm a voice as he could (for though he was quite content to chat with Marley for hours, he never forgot that his friend was a ghost, and he knew that mystery and terror might lurk around any corner of the conversation).
“I’m sorry to frighten you,” said the ghost, not for a moment fooled by Scrooge’s false composure, “but I begin to despair of ever breaking these chains.” At this Marley rose and rattled the chains so that the sound echoed throughout the house, down the stairwell, across the yard below, and down the street, where gaslights flickered and neighbours abed shuddered in their sleep.
Scrooge waited until the echoes had died in the heavy evening air and the spectre had fallen back into his brandy-soaked chair. “You are not so fettered as when you first came to these rooms,” he said. “Surely all your works in the past score of years have shortened the chains you bear. Surely you must be close on to earning your rest.”
“These chains!” cried Marley, holding his arms aloft so that the chains dragged across the floor with a dull growl. “Since the night I enlisted the help of three spirits to turn you from a man of impervious selfishness to one who embraces all his fellow men with Christian love, I have been relieved of but five links.”
“Five links!” said Scrooge, jumping to his feet and striding to the window, where the thick summer air slid into the room. “Five links! But you have laboured these twenty years to help me be a better man, to keep me on the track you so wisely set me upon that Christmas Eve that seems another life ago. How can all those years of devotion have lessened your burden only five links?” And this Scrooge shouted into the night, as if those who imprisoned his friend might be lurking outside his window and find themselves moved by his passionate testimony.
“Five links,” said Marley dully, not moving from his chair. “It is the paradox of my curse that in order to shorten my chains I must do good for those who still live, yet I have forever lost the power to interfere in human affairs. Few of my fellow spectres have lost as many links as five, and most despair of ever lightening their loads.”
Marley tilted his head back once again and opened his ghostly mouth, and more to stanch the wail that would curdle his blood than because he knew of any way to free Marley from his torment, Scrooge said, “What if there were a way?”
Marley froze, his mouth so wide that his face appeared nearly overwhelmed by its cavernous blackness. Then, slowly, silently, he lowered his gaze to the empty fireplace, pressed his thin lips together, and sat for several minutes, not wailing or howling or rattling his chains—sat for so long, in fact, that Scrooge began to wonder if ghosts could fall asleep. He was going over in his mind all of Marley’s previous visits, trying to recall if such a thing had ever occurred, when the ghost parted his lips just enough to murmur, in a tone so low as to be nearly inaudible, “A way?”
Scrooge turned from the window to find Marley’s gaze locked on him, and he almost thought he detected a spark of hope in the spirit’s empty, passionless eyes. “Let us consider th
e problem as a business proposition,” said Scrooge, encouraged by the bemused expression that seemed to wash over Marley’s face. “You arranged for one man—that is, myself—to see the error of his ways and to waken his latent power for good on a single day, Christmas Day. For that your load was lightened by five links.”
“True,” said Marley, still not moving.
“One man, one day, five links,” said Scrooge, who, now that he had begun to think in terms of numbers, was in familiar territory. He could see the solution to Marley’s torment like a row of figures in a ledger laid out before him—a simple matter of arithmetic. “What if I told you,” he said, “that I knew of a way to help hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and not just on one day, but on every day of the year? If one times one equals five links, three hundred and sixty-five times a thousand would free you of your chains a hundredfold.”
“You were never as skilled with numbers as I, Ebenezer,” said Marley. “I have changed you for more than a single day and you have been of aid to many others.”
“But nonetheless,” said Scrooge, “that goodwill is but a fraction of what I now envision.”
“But you know it is not within my power to help the living,” said Marley with a sigh, and he sank back into his chair and dropped his head onto his ghostly chest so that the two seemed almost to merge.
“Not possible for you, perhaps,” said Scrooge, now trembling with the excitement of the vision unfolding before him, “but what if it were possible for me? What if I could help a thousand people or a hundred thousand, but I couldn’t do it without you? Wouldn’t that count for something?”
Without realising how it happened, for he never saw Marley budge from his chair, Scrooge found himself enveloped in a cold so chilling he could not move. It was a feeling that would have struck terror in the hearts of most men, but Scrooge knew it to be Marley’s embrace. Cold though it was, he could feel the joy in his friend’s spirit and the hope in his dormant, ghostly heart. And for the first time in all the years he had known Marley, thirty-two years in life and twenty years in death, he felt something else. A single icy tear dropped from Marley’s eye onto Scrooge’s cheek.
The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge Page 2
